“I have to get out of here,” Julie said. “I have to get to the airport.”
I took hold of her shoulder. “I’ll take you.”
“Let’s go,” she replied. “Let’s go.”
If those ferns set the hook, the Corvette drew blood.
When we walked up, Julie did a double take as she realized which baby was mine. Sure, some of the yellow fiberglass was cracking through, and the racing spoiler drooped to the right, but Julie let out a little woo when the engine fired up. I had a loose motor mount, which caused the whole rig to rumble and vibrate, so revving the engine sent some serious quakes up our tailbones.
I goosed it out of the lot, the tires sizzling some ice before they found traction. They caught with a lurch, causing a couple baby liquor bottles to roll from the dash down to Julie’s lap, and soon we owned the blacktop — glassed-over postboxes flew past, along with the cocooned rumps of family sedans and an occasional swing set, sinister with icicles. The Eagles were in the cassette deck, but unless things reached critical, I figured I’d hold off.
I looked over at Julie — she had her nasal spray out, and she was trying, without success, to land a few blasts. Her cheeks were swollen, her lips puffy red.
“Are you cold?” I asked, pointing a heat vent her way, though the warm air carried the faint waft of my father’s cologne, which smelled too much like Highlander for my comfort.
She kept looking at me like I was real trouble, like drunken, swashbuckling botanists were her weakness. “A Pittisporum chrebus?” she asked me, shaking her head in disbelief. “It’s a good thing I’m leaving this state. It’s a good thing I’m getting away from the likes of you.”
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“On you are all the danger signs,” she said. “Can you see what happens to me? Do you see how I suffer?”
Julie tried to swallow through a constricted throat and swollen glands. She snuffed at me. In futility, she dropped the nasal spray, then turned to the window, to the barren whiteness streaking by. The edge of town had given way to open road, the slats of snow fences flapping as we passed them. Hormel grew in the distance.
“There’s something special about you, Dr. Nivitski,” I told her. “Join me for a salad at the Sky Lounge, would you?”
She didn’t say anything.
I said, “Look, if this is about those little liquor bottles, I assure you I had nothing to do with them.”
“I’ve heard that one before,” she said, and I could tell that was the end of it.
Soon the blue-lit runway was pacing the road beside us, and I became melancholy. Airports had always disturbed me, especially now. It wasn’t the fact that, from time to time, planes fell flaming from the sky: that seemed pretty normal. What got me was the idea of crossing a whole continent and simply dropping in someone’s lap. The idea is, you just ambush this distant stranger, chum it up for a while, and then you’re gone, probably forever. Maybe that person doesn’t want you dropping in. Maybe that person doesn’t want anything to do with you — does anyone ever think of that? Maybe that person lives far away for a reason.
And on an airplane, you don’t even have time to think about what you will say to this stranger you’re jumping, how you’ll act, whether you’ll pretend to know the “real them.” It’s just over: one minute you’re looking at the high-altitude rat maze of their city, and then you’re landing, and the next thing you know—How do you do! — you’re there. Does anyone want to look at his own hometown from that height? The whole of the Dakotas, seen from a window at thirty thousand feet, looks not unlike the pale, pointless patterns strewn through acoustic tile, or the smattering of brown flecks amid a catbox of white.
I pulled into the white zone and left the motor running. Through the glass I saw ticket counters for all the major airlines, though only prop-driven planes landed here. Bill Hasper’s lone cab idled in the loading zone, waiting for the next fare or the rapture, whichever came first.
When Julie climbed out of the car, she looked as if she was still vibrating. She jerked her bag from behind the seat, slammed the door, then leaned in the window. I was still hoping to come into the terminal with her, buy her a snack or something, and, I hoped, talk.
Instead, she simply said “Thanks” and was gone.
No See you later or Catch you soon. Julie didn’t say Until we meet again, or even Looking forward. I would have settled for Aloha, but what could I do? I turned on my emergency lights and bolted for the airport. The terminal never changed: a blast of air hit me when the doors rolled open, followed by the must of snow-sogged carpets, and that fried-metal smell of overworked space heaters. I trotted through the terminal, its pitted windows showing foamy pink puddles of de-icing fluid that blew into clouds when a turboprop kicked up. Alone out on the frozen flight deck was a large aluminum crate. Did I hear a faint barking?
I caught her at Security. She’d just fed her carry-on into the X-ray machine, and she was about to step through the metal detector. She held a belt by its silver buckle.
“Julie, wait,” I said. “You’ve got me all wrong. I’m better than you think. I’m not some guy who throws out empty pickup lines. I’m no college-mixer Casanova.”
She stopped short of the security scanner. “In that house of yours,” she asked, “you don’t have a Draculunus vulgaris, do you?”
“Of course,” I said. “Absolutely.”
Julie put her hands up, flat-palmed, to keep me from going on.
“Please stop,” she said. “No more talk of plants, and put sex out of your mind.”
“I love vulgarises,” I said. “I have two of them.”
This sent a visible shiver through her.
“Enough,” she said, and spun on her heel, passing through the metal detector, toward the gates, and beyond.
Chapter Five
How invigorating! I felt like a new man.
The first thing I did was head straight for my office, where Junior was calling. Somehow that old Depletionists fire had stoked itself again, and I’d regained the drive that had sent me down into the library basement every night for six years while writing it. This was the energy I’d thrived on before I received any acclaim, before I made friends or had students, back when the world wanted nothing to do with me. Funny how quickly that scientific magic can return. I didn’t have time for agri-business lectures or fancy plants, let alone pussyfooting around with stuck-up women. I had work to do! Julie’s brush-off, far from setting me back, had been a real boon — now I could see what really mattered. Rejection always had a way of rejuvenating me, making me feel like my old self!
I tore into those boxes and began sorting knee-high stacks of paper, creating a skeleton of the multivolume project ahead. By evening, my office was filled with high-rises of paper, and I decided that if I got cracking, there was no more than three years’ work here, tops. My “junior answer to the junior minds of critics” had amassed itself into a unified-field theory on the disappearance of a people. The task was daunting, but I had a vision. I believed 100 percent in my theory — that an entire people had been selfish, that they’d lived solely for themselves and they’d left their offspring nothing.
When you’re a student, they teach you to be slow and skeptical, to gather data patiently, analyze them, and only then form a hypothesis. But that’s not how it really works, not at all. In real life, it’s just the opposite. You take a position you know in your heart to be true and then support it for all your worth, no matter what colleagues desert you, no matter which journals show you their backs. The dust from all those boxes was making my skin itchy, but did anyone care? Was Anthropology Today the least bit interested in my sneezing fit? Did Hatitia Wells give one titty about my scalp? Of course not. That’s what being a scientist was all about.